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Description
Price options per session:
1. Standard rate: £25*
2. Supporter rate:£35 (to be ticked and added on the registration form)
3. Supported rate per session: If you are unable to afford the our standard course rate, please contact us here. We will make sure that no one is turned away because of lack of funds
*NB: The session with Bhikkhunī Dhammadinna and Martine Batchelor on the 22nd November will be priced differently at £15 and students will be invited to offer Dāna during the session.
Theme:
The Bodhi College Conversation Series is dedicated to the cultural translation of the Dharma into our present-day lives.
For this brand-new collection of online conversations, our teachers have turned to people who interest them personally. People whose work, experience or reflections they’d like to get to know better - people who they would like to know more from, discuss with, understand better.
From nuns to philosophers, we will be joining together to converse with people from all walks of life and backgrounds, including art, literature, Buddhist studies, philosophy and psychotherapy.
In these specially curated one-on-one conversations, our teachers will ask the questions that they would like to explore – as teachers, but also as ordinary people, living their own lives - discussing topics that overlap with Buddhist themes and values.
Part lecture, part fire-side chat, our teacher will introduce the guest speaker and invite them to make a presentation, followed by questions from both the host and the audience.
We’re aiming to explore the learning and understanding that come from different fields of knowledge that often don’t reach the meditation hall. Building bridges between different fields of Buddhist practice and studies, and with other disciplines that have relevance to how we view forms of Buddhism and its practices.
There truly will be something here to interest everyone, in these carefully selected, one-off conversations.
Each conversation in the series will be completely self-contained, and you can join as many sessions as you would like to.
Event Details
Schedule & Topics:
The series is ongoing. For now we have opened registrations for dates until the end of 2025. We will open registrations for 2026 once available. Please note that each conversation will be held on different days at different times to suit the availability of the guest speaker.
Please make sure to tick all the sessions you would like to attend when you register, it will not be possible to amend your booking once processed, unless you use a different email address.
Please note that from 26th October 2025 2am European Summer Time (CEST) will change back to Winter time (CET). For time zone conversions to your local time, please feel free to use this link.
Dates/Topics/Speakers:
Please note that all sessions will be 2 hours long.
13 September 5pm CEST: Avoiding Meanness: Learning from Hungry Ghosts with Andy Rotman, hosted by Akincano Weber
Hungry ghosts (preta) in Buddhist literature are great teachers. Having broken the law (dharma) in a previous life, they now suffer terrible consequences. And since they don’t want others to make the same mistakes, they speak passionately and honestly, hoping to convince others to follow the path of righteousness, rather than succumbing to self-righteousness. The goal is for all of us to avoid the terrible torments of the prison house that is the hungry ghost realm, where all food and drink turns into shit and piss. The cause of all this misery, according to Buddhist texts, is the cultivation of “meanness” (mātsarya), which makes people miserly, spiteful, and cruel, immoral and oblivious to their own delusions. To better understand this pathology, we will examine stories about hungry ghosts in Indian anthologies from the early centuries of the Common Era, like the Avadānaśataka (One Hundred Stories) and Divyāvadāna (Divine Stories), and their representations in art and philosophy.
9 October 7pm CEST: Law, Politics and Power in A Hurting World: Mindfully Navigating Social Change with Rhonda Magee, hosted by Martine Batchelor
This session will explore contemplative social engagement and equity work. We will discuss how ethical engagement in the world may be supported by Buddhist teachings including grounding practices, insights into conditionality and impermanence, and meeting suffering while resourcing in joy and belonging.
31 October 7pm CET: Buddha, Socrates, and Us: Ethical Living in Uncertain Time with Stephen Batchelor, hosted by John Peacock.
A conversation between Stephen Batchelor and John Peacock about Stephen’s new book.
22 November 5pm CET: Self and Other: Early Buddhist Pathways of Relational Presence with Bhikkhunī Dhammadinna, hosted by Martine Batchelor
How did the early Buddhist teachings understand the constructs of and boundary between self and other? In this session, Bhikkhunī Dhammadinnā will open with a brief overview of the text-historical approach to early Buddhist sources. This will form the basis for a joint reflection with Martine (and participants) on how the teachings they have transmitted shape and question the sense of self in relation to others, drawing on selected textual examples.
13 December 5pm CET: The Elephant and the Blind: Groundless Ground and Practical Implications for Meditators from 500+ Experiential Report on Pure Consciousness with Thomas Metzinger, hosted by Akincano
A conversation with Thomas Metzinger, a meditator, theoretical philosopher, cognitive scientist and co-founder of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, about the implications of his latest research, which compiles data from hundreds of meditators' reports on minimal phenomenal consciousness. (see https://mpe-project.info for free book download & more).
Suitability:
Open to all - new and experienced practitioners alike.
Recordings:
This series will be recorded.
Cost:
- The price includes a fee for the teachers, no additional dana will be requested, except for the session with Bhikkhunī Dhammadinna as explained above.
Teachers:
RHONDA V. MAGEE, M.A., J.D., is Professor of Law (Emeritus), the founding Director of the Center for 
Contemplative Law and Ethics, at the University of San Francisco, Founder of the Mount Iris Meditation Community (2025). She is an internationally-recognized thought-leader on applying mindfulness practices in support of personal and collective wellbeing. She is the author of the The Inner Work of Racial Justice: Healing Ourselves and Transforming Our Communities Through Mindfulness(Penguin RandomHouse TarcherPerigee: 2019), which broke new ground on publication as the first book of its kind to integrate mindfulness principles and practices thoroughly into the conversation on addressing race and racism in diverse settings and communities, and helping us heal from the trauma that the legacies of racism causes. Her current work explores how culturally-specific practices – including Black cultural spirituality and the quality of soulfulness -- intersect with mindfulness and may strengthen communities across differences in these challenging times.
BHIKKHUNÏ DHAMMADINNĀ was born in Italy in 1980 and went forth as a monastic in the Theravāda Buddhist tradition of SriLanka in 2012. She studied Indology, Indo-Iranian philology and Tibetology at the University of Naples 
‘L’Orientale’, at the International Research Institute for Advanced Buddhology at Soka University in Tokyo and at the Institute for Research in Humanities at Kyoto University. She is the co-founder (with Bhikkhu Anālayo) and director of the Āgama Research Group (established in 2012) and serves as an associate research professor in the Department of Buddhist Studies of the Dharma Drum Institute of Liberal Arts in Taiwan. She is currently a visiting professor for Buddhist Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Having lived and worked in the UK, Nepal, Burma/Myanmar, Japan, Taiwan, and Sri Lanka, she has now been based in Italy for a few years. In 2024 Bhikkhunī Dhammadinnā was appointed as a registered Buddhist minister with the Italian government through the Italian Buddhist Union.
THOMAS METZINGER is a meditator, theoretical philosopher, cognitive scientist and co-founder of the 